30 Years of Marriage: The Myths and the Magic

I find it strange that we revere years of marriage as an absolute indicator of success. It’s like we’ve never met a long-time married couple before. When people ask me how you stay married for 30 years, I say, keep being married. Oh, and don’t die. That’s kind of the magic of it. Don’t get me wrong, there are great reasons not to stay married. Anyone brave enough to end a toxic relationship should be revered far more than those with high numbers.

That said, wow, 30 years. I did not see that coming.

I mostly didn’t see it coming because at the age of 24 when I got married, 30 years was longer than I’d been alive. I could not imagine being that old. Much like marriage, the secret to aging is closely related to staying alive.

Alive I am, gratefully. Married I am, gratefully.

Writer that I fancy myself to be, it’s tough to quantify or articulate what it’s like to be married this long. That’s why when my data-driven husband drew me a roadmap of our years together, I cried. I cried partly because it was so sweet, but a lot because he bested me. He had somehow captured the highs and lows of our marriage like a secret language, an encrypted code, that only he and I could understand.

The items on there might make you scratch your head. How could “Pat Dwyer!!!” Make the list? Well, I’ll tell you. After we scraped together enough money to buy our first house we became devout weekend Home Depot warriors. Doing electric, painting, tiling, gardening, reseeding. We did it all and we were exhausted. We finally splurged on having our windows painted. We hired Pat Dwyer and he did the worst job ever.

All the windows were painted shut and ruined when you opened them. Every time we had to interact with our windows, which was a lot because we didn’t have central air and basically lived in the attic, we would yell at the top of our lungs, “Pat Dwyer!” We didn’t need a curse word to go with it. His name had become the curse word. Pat Dwyer has been shouted throughout the years more times than I can count.

That’s really what a long marriage is. A collection of shared experiences that are imprinted so tightly into the fabric of your relationship that sometimes it can hold the whole damn thing together. How could I possibly explain “You’re Scampi” to anyone on the planet?

If you are married 30 years or longer, there will be many times that you think, really? this? forever? In fact the longer you stay married the longer the “really, this” stages can last. Don’t go to bed angry turns into like a year where you quietly didn’t like each other much. A rough patch has the time to take on a rolling meadow of its own that you can live quite comfortably in.

I don’t remember what ends those meandering times of disconnection, but I’d venture a guess that it starts with a “Pat” and ends with a “Dwyer.”

I think we have worked hard on our marriage. We were kids when we said I do and have found a way to both be part of a couple while honoring who we are as individuals and giving that oxygen to grow and change. It would be easy for me to smugly tell you that we earned our long marriage, but I never want to perpetuate the myth. The truth is that we got pretty damn lucky.

Yup. Luck is a big part of a long marriage.

The idea that we chose wisely is the myth. The truth is we were young and fickle and impulsive. We connected. We had chemistry. With the confidence reserved for the young, we got married at 23 and 24. Our friends and family were betting, openly at our wedding I might add, against us. Had I known at the time, I would have probably taken the divorce odds. Lucky, I didn’t.

The luck was that we didn’t know how well we would work together as life partners and parents through a myriad of unexpected challenges. Lo and behold, if we weren’t mostly aligned. Mostly.

We are not aligned on times of the day we like to awake. He’s a cheerful morning person. I’m a night owl. We are not aligned on vacation spending, a battle I have won. We are not aligned on organization. He likes order. I’m chaotic. He told me early on that if I put things back in the same place I’d always be able to find them. Damn if he wasn’t right.

30 years is best characterized, unpoetically, by… you win some, you lose some… if you are willing to bend a little. Be a willow.

When I look back at our disagreements over the years I’m shocked to find the two that come to mind are about the consistency needed to declare something a stew after I refused to eat his watery “stew” that was, in fact, a flavorless soup. And, you won’t believe the other was about a top sheet, to use or not to use. Hamlet knows what I’m talking about. That one got ugly.

Not to say we haven’t had some real watershed moments of “really? this?” We have. Nothing I’m willing to share here but trust me, we have both felt justifiably taken for granted. What I’ve loved, though, as stupid as this might sound, is that even in the worst of it, I’ve had someone who also checks the doors at night and adjusts the temperature. Just this ever present partner who shares the responsibilities of existence, and bug killing.

Of all of the luck we’ve had, nothing was quite as lucky as when I left a bridal shower with a randomly selected tiny plant as a favor. At a red light, I noticed it had a quote attached to it. It’s still my favorite quote and my compass for the kind of person, mother, wife, and friend I want to be. “What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other.” Wow. Read it again. It’s by a woman, George Eliot, using a male pseudonym. She really understood the meaning of life.

I got this quote before fertility issues, before kids, before Pat Dwyer painted our windows, before the majority of the struggles of raising kids and living with another person for so long. When things get bad, I touch that quote in my mind and ask myself, what do I live for? And, of course, it’s vacations and a nice thick stew.

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